Of all press releases in recent memory, this is the one that reads the most like hard science fiction.
Somewhere this morning a low-level SpaceX engineer was apologetically skipping out of the house. A full breakfast—uneaten, except for the toast he grabbed—laid out on the kitchen table and now the focal point of his wife's muttering. In the background a TV has the morning news on, briefly mentioning the geomagnetic storm. "I promise I'll be back in time for Kaitlyn's play. ...Yes I know how much this means to her."
But he won't be, will he? Because by the end of the day, the entire world will have been transformed in ways nobody could have seen that morning. Except for the perennially-ignored news anchor on in the background.
EDIT: Yeah, https://xkcd.com/1387/
The billion sounds linguistically more correct, but I have no idea if those are inflation adjusted dollars or whatever. It could be an error that telephones around the internet as 33.0 million by the US system then converted to someone in the EU to 33.000 because they misread the number.
Impulse, by the way, is covered by the press release [1] and, I agree, would need to be a priority no matter which FTL drive is used to get the satellites to their final destination.
[1] > The Starlink team commanded the satellites into a safe-mode where they would fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag—to effectively “take cover from the storm”